Review without a price

Ready to upgrade. But i'll wait for now

I'm sitting with my Aspire One 725 netbook. Perfectly good for browsing, banking and watching 720p. But cramped screen and crappy AMD CPU means i'm on the lookout for a grunty 13-14". But £1350 for 3hrs battery and a a HDD? Wow. Mugs game. I'll sit back and wait for the inevitable heavy discounting.

lost opportunities for Juniper

I never understood why Juniper or Brocade weren't more aggressive in their pricing strategies. We trialled some of Juniper's kit a few years ago, and found them to be cisco in a blue coat. I was prepared for the higher fail rates and clunkier hardware that i got, but was really surprised when i saw the numbers we were paying. We ended up going back to Cisco.

There's a real demand for some proper competiton in this arena, and yet the other players just don't seem to step up.

Re: Next

I bought a pure radio for the inlaws last year, and the "optional" battery back is a bit naff, its completely proprietary, you can't just stick some duracall in there. I always thought that was a bit of a con.

I can tell you I manage 2 data centres totalling 14,000 sq foot. first is 8k sqf and has 950kw, (completely utilised) and the second is 6k sq foot and has around 900kw (80% utilised).

I guess your figured are there or thereabouts.

This doesn't include cooling which is powered separately and managed by the host.

So i'g guess your figures are reasoably there or thereabouts. Worth noting that in our larger smaller DC, we have loads of power and no usable space, and in our bigger DC we have loads of usable space and no power.

its worth bearing in mind that although some devices are becoming more power efficient, the majority of kit is only ever utilised at 10% tops. so if all the kit was running full throttle, temperature might become an issue.

Alos, bear in mind that old, inefficent kit is still a bugger to remove when the unix guys love its reliability (i/m looking at you, RS/6000)

lovely, until the price

Decent size, reasonable spec. But whoa, the price man. £225 barebones? thats a big premium for a reasonably small box.

I had a PI running XMBC and now an ebay acer revo thin client doing the same thing (£40). Who would want to spent £300+ on this solely to stream media to the telly?

Nive to see some lower wattage gear becoming a bit more mainstream, but wheres the niche? teach a kid to code x86 on this, or get them an old celeron off ebay for a 10th of the price? its not going to replace a laptop, and isn't powerful enough to be my main rig.

I'm sure this has a place, i'm just not sure where. Shame as i like the idea.

Re: Completely right on all accounts

There seems to be a few arguments here for using tablets / ereaders at textbook replacements. Seems a worthy idea in principle. As I child, I would much prefer walking a nexus to 5 textbooks a day a but I would love to know the figures on books costs vs ebook costs. The publishers make a *mint* on selling text books, often upwards of £30 a pop. University books even more of a killing. The print cost is bugger all of the sale price. I can’t see why they would cannibalise their own margins to sell ebooks cheaply. Its a pretty closed market too, not like another publisher has a volume of GCSE/ SATs accredited levels of study material.

Secondly, textbooks last ages. I’m sure we all remember getting a naff 20th hand textbook and looking in the front cover to see what student it was previously lent to. I started secondary school in 1994. I distinctly remember being given a text book that was printed in 1983, the year I was born. So that book lasted at least 11 years. That wasn’t unusual. You find me any tablet that’ll last typical kids usage for more than 2 years. I can’t see it. I‘m not arguing that we should never update teaching materials, but I’m not yet convinced an ebook is the answer to integrating tech into schools.

***The below numbers are estimates. If you know better, feel free to correct. I’d love to see some proper maths***

Lets say a small secondary school has 5 year groups, 2 classes per Year group (30 per class). Thats a total of 60 students per year, and 300 students in all. Each student needs 8 textbooks per year for a variety of subjects.

Working to the assumption that a text book costs £30 and an e version costs £20. (go on amazon, even chart retail books are usually barely discounted)

Also assuming the school avoids a £300 iPad and buys a £150 budget jobbie

*Option 1*

School buys old style text book. Each book lasts a decade.

School buys £30 text book x 8 per student x 300 students = £72,000

Total cost of Paper text books is £72000. Lifespans of 10 years, Thats £7,200 per year.

Lets say the books only last 6 years, thats £12,000 per year

*Option 2*

School buys cheap 10” tablet per student and 1e licence per student per subject. The e licence is permanent and therefore is transferrable to subsequent students.

Licence cost is £20 licence x 8 per student x 300 students = £48,000

Hardware cost is £150 per tablet x 300 students = £45000. Hardware lasts 2 years (MAX) so over a decade will need to buy 5 times = £225,000

Total cost of electronic text books is £225,000 over 10 years. Thats £22,500 per year.

Lets say the project lasts 6 years, Thats still £48000 in licences. Lets just argue they get a tablet to last 3 years, albeit unlikely. Thats 2 purchases = £90,000. So a total of £138,000 for a cost of £23,000 p/a

I’ve not even mentioned the cost of charging the devices. I agree it is unlikely to be huge, but equally, it is unlikely to be negligible. 300 tablets twice a week at £0.10 a time is still £3000+ a year. I guess its just the parents who will foot that.

Again, to add, I am happy to be corrected. I currently work in tech and have previously at a publisher of educational books though. A reasonable knowledge of the print industry.

I love tech, and it makes sense to integrate the next generation. I can’t help but get the feeling tablet tech is brought into schools for the kudos rather than any defined savings or advantages. Hubris.

Re: So True...

Re: Another in the long lone of real iPhone killers.

i really don't wanna do the whole "my android is better than your iphone/BB/Winpho" but i can't help but agree with the above statement.

Bought a 16 gig nexus for for £279, comfortably cheaper than every similar device out there. the UI is excellent even for an android virgin. If price is a factor in your purchasing decision, you seriously need to give throught to the Nexus 4. The battery easily lasts a whole day of moderate use (whereas my i4S was dead by 4-5pm). It is light, has an excellent screen and and excellent range of apps. Managed to sell my i4S too which covered 90% of the purchase price.

I’m not sure what the C6220s is about. It is definitely better than the C6100 it replaced. They were a bitch to configure (10+ mins to boot to drac config mode drac per node = hours when you have 6 chassis to rig up) The C6100s i found poor MTBF issues as well, multiple motherboard swapouts particularly.

These (well the predecessor C6100) were designed by Dell at the behest of a rich client who wanted custom gear. The point being to squeeze as many nodes into a defined space as possible. I’ve never seen that these do that. You can get 16 blades into an M1000e encolosure, or 10u of space. I rack 3 chassis in a single 42u rack leaving 12u for airflow and patch panels. Thats a total of 48 servers in a single rack Cooling is never ever an issue on these, they have plenty of on board fans and even at the top of the rack they dont surpass about 30 degrees. However, the C6220s run much hotter. I had 10 of these in a dev rack recently (i.e. for a total of 40 nodes) , and the heat they were kicking out at the back of the reack was obscene. Alarming all over the shop, and anything above halfway up the rack was particularly bad. The only way we could get these running consistently was to place the kit in the first rack by the ACU so it gets more air than most racks.

Bear in mind as well that the Blade chassis includes (in my case) 4 ethernet switches and 2 San switches. Adding the equivalent switching in the rack is at least another 6-8u. Oh, and forgot to add there’s no sfp or san ports on the C6220s so they’re out of the question too.

obviously i cant compare on the Fat kit, but for our use, the 4nodes in a 2u space just doesn’t seem to do the job unless you have loads of cooling but not loads of space.

Re: Lies, Damn LIes etc

Speed up UK release schedules and avoid the exclusive licences and i’m a rehabilitated freetarder

I’ve been known to dabble. I must say generally I buy the dvd when its on offer, rip it and never open it again. However, some stuff the release schedules are awful.

Game of Thrones as an example, probably the best show (in my eyes) to come out of the US in a few years. Season 3 is a few weeks away from transmission, but Season 2 is only just out this week on DVD in the UK. HBO don’t licence to Netflix or Lovefilm so there was no other way to watch it.

I’d happily just got a netflix style subscription if only there was a greater range. It feels to me like i need netflix and lovefilm just to get about half the market.

Re: The Truth

This is really an article aimed at the slightly geeky looking to expand their knowledge but not really learn anything deep about linux

Thats probably me up there. Moving from the "geek by work" to "geek by choice". Would like to learn more about Linux. would happily learn something deep about linux, but would need to know my way around the environment first.

Don't feel any further enlightened after this article., Shame. i got excited when i read the title.

Beware Finance industry figures!

As a contractor at a big bank, I would take the figures with a pinch of salt. My bank's IT is almost all outsourced, bar the desk monkeys. Every few years the bank decides that it has become over reliant on the contractors, hires a few middle men to "refresh the contractor pool" and manage these contractors. Inevitably the productivity halves overnight and then they have to take on a good few of the contractors they just got rid of.

So your advert for a Bank IT job might not be sector growth, so much as replacing staff (forced) turnover

Have a sibling working at HMV, poor chap. Jokes aside, the threat of redundancy is horrid. Best of luck to anyone out jobhunting.

I do think there is a place for a Retail CD / DVD on the High street. I just think they need to review their range. Drop the T-Shirts / Posters / Crap bog Books. Increase the back catalogue range.

Any planned purchases I do are online. I think if HMV offer the same Online range and pricing as Amazon et al, i'd happily shop there. (clearly, the in store range won't be as big, but definitely has room for improvement). In store purchases tend to be a lot more impulsive. I'll wander in for a mooch, then remember they only sell Beats Audio 'phones and Tulisa Contoshaglots albums. Then i'll wander back out.

Come back Netbook

Couldn’t agree more with most of this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a resurgence in Netbooks a few years down the line. Tablets are all well and good, they definitely have their place, but for so many applications, a keyboard and a few more ports is so mightily handy. Maybe a few years of people trying to do their accounts or proper photo editing on a tablet will remind them how handy a keyboard and trackpad can be. And I don’t need to worry about free disk space etc.

Re: no rating?

We all accept if a C64 was given 95% in 1983 then the rating isn’t true today.

We all know that nothing scores below 60%

We all know that Apple always gets the Apple 15% bonus (cue fanbois...)

I just think the rating is a reasonable indicator of the reviewer’s experience of the product. At least class it into something more subjective like BUY/Recommended/Avoid.

Its also a good talking point on the forums as to whether the score is merited etc.

My own preference would be for Reg to use the full range of ratings though. If a product isn’t fit for purpose it should be scoring considerably less than 60%, and manufacturers are still pumping out pointless shite – hence the plethora of 1366*768 kit being churned out.